culture wars 
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SOURCE: The Forum
7/22/2022
"They Want Your Children!": Right-Wing School Panics Seek to Repeal Modernity
by Rick Perlstein
"Reactionary panics about what children learn in school are about as old as time. And they won’t ever go away."
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
12/8/2021
Racism in the Curriculum Isn't Limited to History – It Affects Math, Too
by Theodore Kim
Math is not a neutral space, beyond the reach of history and entrenched racism. At a time of anti-Asian prejudice, American mathematicians obscured the importance of Chinese scholars in developing core concepts that are still significant today, preserving the fiction of math as a western intellectual tradition.
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SOURCE: New York Times
8/21/2021
Historian Gary Nash, Who Fought to Update History Teaching, Dies at 88
Dr. Nash led a project to update national history teaching standards which was denounced by Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives, after a long career as an influential scholar of early American history who reconstructed the lives of ordinary Americans.
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SOURCE: New York Times
8/20/2021
James W. Loewen, Who Challenged How History Is Taught, Dies at 79
James W. Loewen, a sociologist and civil rights champion, took high school teachers and textbook publishers to task for distorting American history.
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8/20/2021
HNN Honors James W. Loewen, 1942-2021
by HNN Staff
HNN honors the life and work of James W. Loewen, author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me" and numerous other books, and an HNN contributor. He passed at the age of 79 on August 19.
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SOURCE: The Bulwark
7/23/2021
America's Founding was Imperfect. Just Ask the Founders
by George Thomas
"The American founding was imperfect. America’s founders weren’t just aware of the point, they insisted on it."
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SOURCE: Mother Jones
7/22/2021
Today It’s Critical Race Theory. 200 Years Ago It Was Abolitionist Literature
In 1829, South Carolina and Georgia responded to a series of fires they assumed were set by enslaved people by banning both the abolitionist literature they blamed for inciting rebellion and the teaching of literacy to slaves. Today's battles over curriculum are likewise about ideas deemed threatening to social hierarchies.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
7/3/2021
Partisans Often Try to Claim July 4 as their Own. It Usually Backfires
by Kevin M. Kruse
Intense partisans seeking to use July 4 celebrations as a way to denounce their opponents as unpatriotic have seldom succeeded, though despite some notorious episodes of Independence Day chaos they will probably keep trying.
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SOURCE: New York Times
7/2/2021
The Battle for 1776
How will the re-emergence of history as a culture war battle front impact the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? Annette Gordon-Reed, Jane Kamensky, Michael Hattem, Kevin Gover, Philip Mead, Robert Parkinson and Alan Taylor are among the historians commenting.
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SOURCE: New York Times
6/4/2021
Tom Hanks: You Should Learn the Truth About the Tulsa Race Massacre
by Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks weighs in on the new culture war over teaching history.
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SOURCE: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
6/2/2021
Georgia State Education Board to Consider Rules on Race
Georgia is the latest state in which conservatives have staked out social studies curricula as a culture war battle front.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
3/16/2021
Why We Should Cancel The Phrase ‘Cancel Culture’
by Max Boot
There are legitimate and important arguments about how much society should tolerate offensive or controversial speech, and how much the markets or public opinion should sanction individuals for what they say. The current "cancel culture" outrage on the right has nothing to do with these arguments.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
3/17/2021
Why Can't Britain Handle the Truth about Winston Churchill?
by Priyamvada Gopal
"Churchill was an admired wartime leader who recognised the threat of Hitler in time and played a pivotal role in the allied victory. It should be possible to recognise this without glossing over his less benign side."
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SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
12/9/2020
What Attacks on Science Get Wrong
by Andrew Jewett
Reductive diagnoses of a "war on science" ignore the specific political and cultural stakes of controversies around vaccination, climate, or creationism.
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9/6/2020
The Latest Resurgence of Ethnic Studies
by Elwood Watson
The history of ethnic studies as an academic movement is a cycle of rise and retrenchment; protest movements often push for more representative curricula, while forces of tradition and austerity seek to uphold a canon or push majors linked directly to the job market. Today's protest movements are pushing an ethnic studies renaissance despite the dire financial straits of many colleges and students.
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SOURCE: Religion and Politics
12-10-15
Stephen Prothero says liberals always win culture wars
That’s his conclusion after a careful review of culture wars since 1800.
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SOURCE: Global Politics
9-30-15
Women’s Rights and the Decline of the Culture Wars
by Jonathan Zimmerman
Last Sunday, at the United Nations, world leaders marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark Beijing accord on women’s rights. They celebrated women’s progress—especially in education, health, and labor—and underscored ongoing gender inequalities.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
4-23-15
Historian hailed for offering a history of the culture wars
As a guide to the late twentieth century culture wars, Andrew Hartman is unrivalled.
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3-22-15
Right Versus Left: Culture Wars, Past and Present
by Walter G. Moss
Both left and right have something to learn from each other.
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SOURCE: McClatchy
4-15-13
Dallek and Leuchtenburg cited in McClatchy article on culture shift
...“On cultural issues, the direction the country is moving is more progressive,” said Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute. “But that’s less clear on economic issues.”The trend to more liberal cultural views is part of a “compassionate impulse” Americans have long held, said author and historian Robert Dallek....“There is a move in the direction of cultural pluralism,” said William Leuchtenburg, historian at the University of North Carolina, with people more accepting of different cultures, different lifestyles and different attitudes .That’s not to say that change comes smoothly. The willingness to change “goes in cycles,” Dallek said, as people stop to absorb a wave of change. Thus, the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment for women, the rise of the Moral Majority and evangelical Christians in politics, and the tide of culturally conservative blue-collar Democrats abandoning their party and helping elect President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s....
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